The Fate of the Tearling

At the end of The Invasion of the Tearling, Kelsea, Queen of the Tearling, turned herself and the sapphires she controls over to her enemy, the Red Queen of Mortmesne. She named the head of her guard, Mace, as regent in her absence and obtained a guarantee from the Red Queen that the Tear would be safe for three years. Even imprisoned and without the sapphires, Kelsea is still seeing visions of the past, this time through the eyes of Katie, a young woman living in the early days after the Crossing. In Kelsea's time Mace works to recover Kelsea from the Red Queen's dungeons, while in Katie's time the seeds for the downfall of Tear's utopian dream are sown. Johansen has consistently taken huge narrative risks with this series, which started as a traditional fantasy and then began incorporating glimpses of a dystopian alternate world.